Jam
by DashOfPeppers
Summary: In the unfortunate circumstances of the universe, all the Doctor had to be was the Doctor-which was to say, absolutely bleeding Mad-and the rest would follow. "The rest" being a chemical reaction resulting in fizzling, sticky goo, the distinct smell of sulfur, trioxygen, and cherries, and Rose Tyler's infamous Look. Or: The Doctor smears himself with jam, and Rose suffers.


Author's Note: I'm glad to barge into the Doctor Who community a decade or so late and pray that someone else is there to hear my sobs. I wrote this directly after watching Doomsday for the first time (yes, it is 2019, and you did read that) and pretended it never happened. I love the Tenth Doctor, naturally. I'm not sure you're allowed to exist in the Doctor Who community if you don't.

A warning: You have never seen parenthesis in such a copious amount until you've read this, and for this, I apologize (no I don't). Also a trigger warning for jam. Not for the jam itself, but the violence that is induced upon it. I'm sure there'll be a committee formed for jam-free violence after this. Hopefully, there'll be cakes.*

* I'm pretty sure committees can't be formed unless there's promise of cakes. Not that I've ever been in any. But that's because I wasn't promised cake.

Also, there'll be footnotes after each asterisk (the * things) because I like to make reading difficult and want to force you to scroll down to get the full joke. Like the one just above. I also expect a full essay written afterwards.

(Edit: I would like to note that I am painfully American and will accidentally use American phrases that are made in a British-based show. This means that there will be embarrassing mistakes made by me and only me, usually in reference to pants. I have come back and edited those moments as quickly as I found them, but I'm sure the damage has been done to at least one poor soul. So if you think that the Doctor was smearing his underwear with jam, I am at fault here. But it's a funny image to have nonetheless.)

* * *

The Doctor was an odd one.

It didn't have to take long to know this. In fact, it didn't have to take more than a second to know this. All it took was one look.

It wasn't that the Doctor was particularly unfashionable. In fact, one could argue that his wardrobe, all tucked safely away in the many storage rooms of the TARDIS, contained the costumery needed to infiltrate the Buckingham Palace to look like the guards, the ministers, or the royal family themselves. No, no, the Doctor was quite alright with fashion, pinstriped suit and long-coat a frequent favorite of his, the slowly-browning converse betraying the clothing's formality. And it wasn't any unusual shade of skin color, like a blue or mauve, that suggested his non-nativeness to Planet Earth (the Doctor often enunciated "Puh-lanet" with a pop of his lips and a cheery grin). In fact, nothing really was odd about his appearance. (Well, save for perhaps his wild hair.)

Except the eyes.

Such glee in those eyes, such a wild fascination with the unknown-or perhaps known to him, but forgotten. They glinted at the most inappropriate moments, barrel of a gun (the shape, the material, and Earthly-or unEarthly-manufacturer varied daily) pointed at his head, or spinning razor heading toward the belly of one of his companions. Their respective aggressors would say something-and they _always did_-and the Doctor's eyes would gleam with a sort of unbridled excitement. Then, he'd open his mouth.

Cheers to you if you could understand even a word of it, aside from the "ands" and "buts," and those he didn't use often. He spoke science, physics (still a part of science), various forms of molecular theory, space-travel-the works, really. No one, not even his companions, quite knew if he was doing it as a tactic to distract their assailants or if he _really_ couldn't help himself, like a child reaching for a sugar cookie. If you were to ask his companions afterwards, they would comfortably say he was doing both, and if you stared at them long enough, a bead of sweat would form on their temple and they'd ask you to please leave, yes thank you, take some biscuits on the way out.

Point is, the man was Mad. So Mad, in fact, that it was principle to capitalize the M to prove that he was the chief of it, or at least to make sure people got the hint. It's just that they didn't realize he was the sort of unEarthly Mad reserved only for Gallifreyans (but since we have no other Gallifreyans to look toward for reference, perhaps just for the Doctor) and it took them a while after meeting the Doctor to realize he was less Earthly mad and more a sort of alien Mad. The eyes, coupled with that unnatural grin, often helped get that idea along faster, though.

Rose Tyler was used to his Madness. Well, she'd say "used to," but a better term would be better-to-adapt-to-it-in-a-high-stress-situation-instead-of-stare-at-him-blankly. Was there a word for that? (The answer is yes, and the word would be "acclimated." Or "conformed." Or maybe just "patient." If you're not reading this in the Doctor's voice, you should be. In the same way his Madness is a part of him, so is his wise-assery.)

Rose wasn't particularly _immune _to his Madness, but she had managed to develop what they both agreed upon (nonverbally, and without any prior conversation, consideration, or even hand-gesture) as The Look-a sort of defense mechanism. The Look was rather versatile in its meanings, adapted to the many changes in mood to her dear Doctor and the many situations that they had been in, which had become so repetitive during their travels that she could almost pinpoint when their assailants would pull out the death-ray ("It's a figure of _speech_, Doctor, I know they're not all death-rays.") and never get a chance to actually do anything with it because the Doctor would either physically or metaphorically tear it out of their grasp.

The Look meant whatever Rose needed it to mean. A selection of her most frequent translations went as followed:

"Doctor," (and they always started with "Doctor," in an exhausted sort of sigh,) "I'm sure this is fascinatin' and all that (to you and only you), but if you don't shut your mouth and start doing that thing you said you'd do to get us out of this mess, we're all going to die a horrible death, and when we're in Hell, if there is a Hell, I'll tell you what I meant to say at the start: Shut up."

"Doctor, this person's parent/lover/child/close-friend and or relative just passed away and it's probably for the best if you stopped talking about the marvelous way in which they died by a long-lost technology that you've never seen but would much like to piece apart. Insensitive is the word, yeah._"_

"Doctor, you are the last living Time Lord in existence, and this act that you have performed not only threatens _your_ life but my own as well, not because I was in physical danger, but because I don't think I could bear living in a universe where you're dead and I'm alive, so if you ever want to see me again, you better start treating this with the appropriate level of _gravity_ it deserves to be given."

and

"Doctor, take that out of your mouth."

Respectively, these translations were ordered in the frequency that they were used.

And whilst today was supposed to be quiet, a sort of "off-day," by the Doctor's description, the universe had a sort of nature to it. Drop a rock in a vat of water, the water will ripple. Flip on a switch and watch a light turn on. Eat Jackie Tyler's homemade haslet, get sick at exactly midnight.

In the unfortunate circumstances of the universe, all the Doctor had to be was the Doctor-which was to say, absolutely bleeding _Mad_-and the rest would follow. "The rest" being a chemical reaction resulting in fizzling, sticky goo, the distinct smell of sulfur, trioxygen, and cherries, and Rose Tyler's infamous Look, being a variant of both the third and fourth regularity.

Because, while the Doctor was considered one of the most brilliant beings in the Universe, coupled with his Madness, Rose Tyler found him, on more occasions than not, utterly daft.

* * *

Presently, the Doctor smearing himself with jam.

Fourteen jars of it, sold for two pounds each at the local market down William Street*. Small glass containers, three hundred seventy grams each, all stacked together and rattling haphazardly on the metal-grated floor, compact with enough pectin to maintain structural integrity and hold the London Bridge together (not naturally, of course-otherwise the architects would be using blueberry jam instead of solid concrete-but the sonic screwdriver was handy in many situations, and strengthening the pectin bonds was no difference).

It was cherry jam (only because they were out of blueberry), and when he had gotten to the register, balancing all fourteen jars in his arms, the clerk had noted unhelpfully that there were trolleys at the entrance, before she began scanning the jars. Fittingly, because of the unusual number, and because it was one of the rules in the Unofficial Clerk Handbook to ask customers questions that the clerks didn't honestly care about, she had asked, "Wot you doin' with all these jams?"

The Doctor had perked up. "Well," he began conspiratorially, "if you really want to know, I'm collecting enough pectin-laden adhesives to counteract the electric flow of my ship and redirect the pulsive energy centralized on the main control panel-since, well, the central control panel sits directly above the main engine-out and back into the capacitor-that's broken, you see, the whole thing is broken, just ca-poot-and hopefully dissolve and/or store the excess energy that leaked from three of the central components. Well, that's for seven of the jars." He paused to take in a great gasp of air, scratch his chin, and point to the jars. "The other seven are for me and my companion-Rose Tyler, lovely girl, likes jackets a lot-to cover ourselves in during the process so that the propulsive energy doesn't enter into our bodies and fry the very core of us from the inside out while the TARDIS is rebooting."

He finished it off with a sniff and a smile. He waited, not particularly for applause, but for _something,_ maybe that sort of daunted surprise that a lot of his past companions made their first several conversations with him. The clerk didn't give him any of that. In fact, now that he thought of it, she had that distinct look of a divorced great-aunt whose love and affection was reserved only for her cat, Fransis, while she watched the rest of the world with slitted, vengeful eyes. Not that the Doctor ever had an aunt like that, or had seen one before, but some conclusions are easier to reach than others. Besides, you couldn't trust anyone who named their cat Fransis.

"I'm making pies for a friend's party," he had said.

The clerk lady had nodded. "'Ave fun with your pies."

The Doctor took his bag of jams, suitably subdued from the conversation.

Which led to the now, where the Doctor was smearing himself with jam in the privacy of his own TARDIS. Which, to a human, sounded odd-even to a Timelord, it sounded odd (and this time, we did not need another Timelord to compare their feelings with). But for your information, he was fully clothed, thank you-didn't want Rose running into the main room with the Doctor in such an embarrassing, ah, disposition, even if it meant smearing his pristine pin-striped suit with jam. To be fair, however, he was in a bit of a hurry-the sharp, bitter scent of burnt insulars, for one, can invigorate one's adrenaline levels if you had enough knowledge to know _where _the scent was coming from, and that it was _bad_-and hadn't the time to change, so when the Doctor saw the clouds of steam (and other things, most of which humans should not breathe in) coming from all the wrong places, he all but threw the bag of jams onto the ground, several shattering in the process, and began smearing the contents onto himself, internally weeping as the sticky ooze touched his suit. He didn't have dry-cleaning on the TARDIS.

Rose was gone. This was not particularly unusual, and he did wish that she'd leave him a note sometimes, you know, so he didn't have to wonder about her general safety during another alien invasion that would happen in the foreseeable future (it _always _happened when he was around, didn't know why), but at the moment, she was placed in the back of his mind. Alarms were blaring. The TARDIS was informing him, with the clarity of a wailing banshee, that it was eleven minutes away from exploding. Well, metaphorically. Well, the TARDIS didn't talk in metaphorics. Well, sort of with him it did. Or he just exaggerated the stakes a bit. The TARDIS was only going to explode _a little bit. _The three components he had mentioned to the clerk and the capacitor (which was already broken, but he supposed it would break some more, to an unfixable state) would shatter and likely rain sparks, fire, and pulsive energy which would effectively poison him, if the sheer heat didn't burn him alive, and then to death. Or regeneration. Which would result in _another_ explosion.

He rammed his entire fist into another jar and scooped the contents out like an over-eager toddler, spilling half of the red jam onto the grates below. He grumbled to himself, under the din of a dozen shrieking sirens. He'd never get the smell out.

The Doctor had estimated that it would take roughly 8 minutes to arrange the jam in its suitable position, which gave him an extra three to check and double-check and triple-check the positions. In the end, it took the Doctor exactly one minute to smear himself with jam, and four to cover half of the console and two of the components before the TARDIS gave a sort of ungodly wail. The Doctor looked up in a frenzy, stared at the monitor above him, before his face become suitably pale. "Oh," he said, as if he'd found out his sushi had eel in it when he asked for crab. He fumbled for his sonic screwdriver.

Let it be said that, when under high-pressure situations, Timelords were especially good at manipulating time to their whims. There was no actual evidence for this, but the general public assumed that there was a sort of magical-or scientific-quality to the Timelords that allowed them to live up to their names, and, if they had the will, they could freeze time itself to accompany their needs.

The Doctor felt that this was a load of bollocks. It was adrenaline, nothing more, that forced the body to work at an intense pace. And he was running on so much at the moment that he made a sort of Mad titter as he cranked several dials and sent jam flying into the Unknowns of the TARDIS (not to be discovered until perhaps three decades from now, by which the little sliver of jam will have cultivated a generous colony of rare fungus, which the Doctor won't have the heart to disinfect). The ship gave a resounding moan, and sparks began to fly. The Doctor busied himself with throwing the rest of the jam onto the necessary components, not caring anymore about the pristine arrangement. The sonic screwdriver whirred in his hand.

Another minute. That was all he got before the TARDIS made a sound like no other, and sparks became flames. His screwdriver had gone from a wild whir to a chaotic screaming, and the Doctor made a noise that could have been intended as a curse but was drowned out by metal roaring above him. The floor rattled. The last of the jars shattered into glass. The steam was building. It was getting hard to breathe.

As Mad as the Doctor was, as much of a clever, ancient _genius _he acted to be, even a Timelord, living for centuries upon centuries and building his experience with humans and aliens alike, surviving unusual occurrence and unexplainable oddity, always found one constant in all his travels: he couldn't account for all of the variables.

The TARDIS exploded.

* * *

Rose Tyler was currently walking down Queens Road, on the complete opposite side of town. She wore a pink-lace dress, white jean-jacket, and her high heels-dangling from her two hooked fingers-clacked against each other as she walked down the road. She had a half-eaten muffin in her other hand.

She looked rather peeved for a shoeless girl at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Perhaps the shoelessness was what made her peeved, if any fellow pedestrians were to speculate. High-heels had a strange power of doing two simultaneous things: making a woman look exceptionally powerful in almost all situations, and making the woman Lord Beezlebub, the spawn of Hell that all should avoid, directly an hour later. It probably had something to do with the swollen ankles. As Rose passed by, local shopkeepers wisely strayed away. (Let's call someone _else_ in, they mused. I don't think I'm ready to atone for my sins just yet.)

The truth was that Rose Tyler wasn't angry at any of the shopkeepers, or at her shoes, or even at her muffin, even though it made an ugly brown smudge at the hem of her dress when she nearly dropped it. She was angry at the one thing that had been consistently the source of her frustration, her exhaustion, and her swollen ankles, which would often lead to her tearing her hair out of shear strain or her falling asleep for twelve hours straight, on a weekly-and more often than not _daily_-basis: the Doctor.

It probably had something to do with their last conversation, which was less of a conversation and more of the Doctor talking at himself and then made a sort of noise when Rose asked a question. The TARDIS had apparently done something irregular, which was hard to discern for a human since _all _of the sounds the TARDIS made triggered that innate human instinct that said that the TARDIS was unusual and dangerous and that meant _bad_ and Rose should very much get out to prevent her innards from exploding. But this was part of the thrill of travelling inside the police-box-shaped spaceship. Among other things. Such as the Doctor practically leaping from beyond the control panels and surveying the symbols on the monitor (which all looked like… well, it looked like alien language to her) with the excitement of a schoolboy child just recently gone out for recess.

"Oh, remarkable!" he cried, and the TARDIS made another noise that did not sound remarkable. "'S never done that before."

Rose felt a reasonable amount of alarm. "What'cha mean?"

"The capacitor!" The Doctor cried, still looking at the monitor as he fished inside his suit for his screwdriver. Rose wasn't sure if that was supposed to be an explanation or if the Doctor was just talking to himself. "It's broken."

"_Broken_?"

At this point Rose knew that the Doctor was pointedly ignoring her. He began to scan the control panel. "Oh, dear," he said when one of the buttons shined a color Rose had never seen before. As in a color she never knew existed. Her human mind, which could only contain so many impossible oddities, decided that this phenomenon was not something it was willing to comprehend, and she promptly forgot that the color ever existed. The Doctor sped past her.

"Doctor, what's wrong?" Thankfully, the TARDIS wasn't moving, so they were under no threat of crashing and being thrown around the main control room like a sack of potatoes. But the alarms were still blaring, and Rose's ears were starting to hurt.

The Doctor disappeared beyond the grated floor down into the winding tubes and glowing lights below, and looking more greasy by the second. Rose could hear the sonic screwdriver whirring in between the pauses of the alarms, and the Doctor said something that Rose couldn't understand. He stared unhappily at something that was blocking Rose's vision.

"Doctor?" she urged, a tad irritably. The Doctor's head popped back up, hair completely wild.

"Blueberries," he said as an explanation. He vaulted himself back up and over the railing, onto the metal floor. He was shrugging on his jacket before Rose could blink. "I'll be right back, don't worry. Just gonna- market, yes, probably has the most jars- S'no problem." He twirled his screwdriver into the air and caught it with one hand before slipping it back into his suit. His face split into that cheeky grin that always made Rose's chest twist, and coupled with the wild hair and soft brown eyes, she couldn't get a word out. "I'll be right back," he said again, and made his way toward the door. He paused and pointed to her. "Don't go anywhere. It'll only take a minute."

Rose was going to tell him that _his _perception of time was skewed, and what would be a "minute" for a Timelord would be more of an hour to a human, and that she wanted to know what was going on, and why she couldn't come. What she managed to get out, however, was, "Wha-" and then the door slammed shut.

In hindsight, she should have run after him, but she didn't. She instead stood there in the still-wailing TARDIS and waited, just like he had told her to.

It had definitely taken longer than a minute. It had definitely taken longer than five. And ten. Fifteen as well. She made a strangled sort of sound in the back of her throat by the twentieth minute, fumbled for her phone, remembered that the Doctor didn't carry a mobile on him, and made another strangled sort of sound albeit more passionately. She stormed out of the TARDIS and decided to search for him.

This had been a poor decision because she had gone (unknowingly) the complete opposite direction that the Doctor had gone. She found herself on the other side of Bristol after thirty minutes without seeing any sign, or even a trail of the Doctor (and there was often a trail, at least of several people who looked dazed and uncomfortable and obviously pretending like there had been nothing wrong). She came to the conclusion that she had gone the wrong way and mourned her loss by buying a small chocolate muffin from a local shop. She then spun around, shoes clacking against each other (she had taken them off sometime after buying the muffin, feet throbbing and on her half-way transformation into Lord Beezlebub), and made her way back.

On a whim, she called the Doctor on the TARDIS.

He didn't pick up.

* * *

A white cloud clung to the ceiling. Sparks were slowly dying down, sputtering and coughing out from the wires with a sigh. The alarms, once shrieking and grating against the walls, were dead. The central control panel looked scorched along its lights and buttons, covered in a sort of blackened sticky soot that smelled like charcoal and something bitter. There was a coat, thrown over the metal railings, that was edging dangerously down into the abyss of wires and engines below. On the grated floor above the humming murmurs lied a figure, more still than the machine itself, legs crookedly folded over the metal, steam still trailing from the shoes. Beyond him, a strange thin tube, small enough to hold, fizzled in the dark, its round blue stone cracked.

Inside the TARDIS, it smelled sweet.

* * *

Rose was craving candy. Specifically cherry candy, the sort that you only find on Halloween night that were given by the odd old women who were missing an eye or a finger. (They weren't _actually_ missing any fingers or eyes, but a child's imagination should never be challenged, and Mrs. Thompson _did _have a tendency to squint a lot.) The ones that you would find in grocery stores, that had the same brand and same wrappings, tasted like cough drops. Rose had privately wondered, when she was younger, if there had been a mischievous spirit that danced along the aisles and cursed the candy into sickly-sweet medication, else the candy be too powerful and become a new form of currency.

With this, she felt a bit self-consciousness, seeing as she just finished her muffin and shouldn't feel the slightest bit peckish. She sniffed and regarded her stomach with a frown, and then sniffed some more. She raised her head.

Something was wrong. She couldn't quite place it, with the wind rustling her hair and throwing dust and leaves and old-Bristol air into her face, but she felt suddenly cold. Uneasy. That sort of nervous sickness that settled in your gut and stewed a hot, sweaty chill in your bones.

The Doctor had emphasized, years ago, that those feelings were good, that they were built-in sensors, much like the alarms in his TARDIS, that all humans should listen to. The mind subconsciously gathered data from all surrounding sources, calculating various patterns from both the living and unliving to form a sense of normalcy, of safety, and that twist in your gut was your mind sensing that one of those patterns was off. "Listen to it, Rose," he had said. Not that Rose ever_ didn't. _It was just pinpointing the _what_ was the difficult part. What was causing the annoying twisting and churning and chilling?

When she turned around the corner, back to the empty park, and saw the blue TARDIS with its door cracked open and the trickle of smoke, she knew.

* * *

The door rattled against the hull when Rose burst in. She sucked in the air to shout for the Doctor, but there was smoke and mist and a horrible smell, and she choked halfway through before her eyes started streaming. Nearly tripping over her feet, she ran back and threw the other door open to let the cloud of smog out, lungs burning as she tried to cough out the muck. She staggered back inside, up the railing.

"Doctor!" she tried again. She heard a faint sizzling, a sort of hissing noise beneath her feet, beyond the railing and into the tubes and electrical wires and engines. The twist in her gut twisted more. She didn't have to be the Doctor who know something was broken. Things that were broken tended to do things like hiss and sputter and groan, so Rose took an educated guess and assumed that the pattern wouldn't be broken amongst universes, even in a craft that transcended space and time. She surveyed the clearing fog, heart pounding in her throat, _hoping. _

She felt sick when she saw something dark crumpled on the ground.

"Oh my god."

She ran for the Doctor. He was lying on his back, bits of glass scattered around him-his head, his arms, some of it in his hair-and his legs were crooked as they were splayed haphazardly on the floor. His eyes were closed, his face covered in soot, and his clothes were covered in…

"Oh my _god_."

A deep red soaked his clothes, stretched along his suit in streaks. It was along his neck, thick clumps of it dotting the skin, streaked over his cheeks and crusting over bits of stubble where he had missed when shaving that morning (_"Rose, have you seen the shaving cream?" he had asked that morning. "This one smells funny, like vanilla…" God, it was just a few hours ago. She should have told him, should have said something; the TARDIS had been making weird noises ages ago and she had thought it was all a part of the design, but she should have made a fuss, should have told him sooner, maybe if he had known-_). The red was on his hands, like paint that smelled rotten and _sweet_, and oh God the TARDIS was spinning from underneath her. His fingers had made a trail, bright and glittering red, grotesquely dazzling against the dull metal, and she followed it along the floor and up the control panel. Her head throbbed when she saw fingerprints smeared over the buttons and lights, strips of red in the shape of claws. He had tried to stop it. Something was wrong with the TARDIS, and he had tried to stop it.

She couldn't get her hands to stop shaking. The floor swayed beneath her and she tumbled down, right beside the Doctor, as her head sagged down and down and down. She covered her mouth with her hands. She was going to throw up.

"Doctor?" She reached out to touch him.

The Doctor's eyes snapped open.

Rose screamed.

"Oh. Hullo, Rose." said the Doctor, who was covered in red and soot and smelt like burnt fruit but was clearly and obviously staring at her, awake and not possessed by a zombie parasite (or, at least Rose hoped). He sat up, which apparently wasn't a good idea, and immediately swayed, squeezing his eyes shut. "Sorry, sorry, excess thermal energy still coursing through. Makes me woozy." His face twisted in a sort of exaggerated concentration and sniffed. He stayed there for a second, sniffed again, before snapping his eyes back open. "There we are." He smiled and leapt back onto his feet. He surveyed the TARDIS, dimly lit and smog still clearing out, with an apparently satisfied conviction. "Damage not so bad, I suppose, and conveyors suitably sealed." He leaned over the railing to stare below them. "Let's see, one, two… and…. Three! Three components all properly contained, just in the nick of time, with some sugary sweetness to boot. I might just say…" He bent over and retrieved his screwdriver, ignoring the cracked gem as he gave it a spin in the air and caught it with a wink "An unequivocal success." He frowned at his companion. "What're you doing on the ground?"

Rose's head was still spinning. "You're covered in blood."

"Blood? No, no, _no_. Not blood." He smeared a bit of the red off of his suit and popped it into his mouth. "Jam! Not blueberry, sadly; the market didn't have it. Which, by the way, what market doesn't have _blueberry jam? _They had blueberries, of course, but not blueberry _jam. _Would have helped to even have some apple jam, though mind you, I don't really expect a market to have _apple jam**_, sounds almost weird, apples- You know, I don't think the human race much _likes _apples. What with the story of Eden, and that one American who chopped down the apple trees, and with students bringing their teachers apples, hoping they choke-and don't you act like I don't know that, you can tell in their eyes- _Anyways,_" the Doctor took a breath. "Cherries! They had cherry jam, which wouldn't be my first choice what with their lower pectin concentration, but it's not like any of the human markets have pure pectin tubes that sit on a rack, so I had to do with the cherry jam and just aggravate the chemical bonds to-"

"It looks like blood," Rose said.

The Doctor stared at her."Well. Yeah. It probably does." He scooped another swab of jelly with his fingers and examined it. "Must've gotten darker when it absorbed the smoke. And the pulsive energy must have unraveled the pectin bonds and… well, made it more watery to make it look… oh yes, _strikingly _similar to blood, yeah. But!" He popped his fingers back in his mouth, giving the jam another lick, before shrugging off his suit jacket, still smothered in sticky red, and tossed it aside to reveal his unblemished shirt. "Perfectly fine! See? No holes, no burns. My face feels a bit sticky and I think some of the residue energy is gonna settle into my calves for the next couple hours, but nothing a good bath won't solve-"

"I thought you were dead," Rose said.

The Doctor's smile wavered. He glanced at the controls and poked at a few switches, the TARDIS humming around them, before he swiveled back with forced cheeriness. "Oh, you don't need to worry about me! My biology is different from yours; blast was completely harmless-could only give me a little sizzle, like a bug bite." His teeth clacked together, and he fiddled with the jam still on the control panel, all burnt and filled with soot. "_This_ helped. Not just fruit preservatives. A small container filled to the brim with sugar molecules that sort of stick together, like cement-but not actually cement-that helps with not only with binding the components together and preventing the leakage of poisonous gas the TARDIS typically keeps filtered, but to also direct the pulsive energy into the jam and not _me. _So," his voice light and squeaky, "I'm fine." He licked his fingers a third time.

Rose hated this. This pretend little game the Doctor did, acting like nothing was wrong. It burned something deep inside her, something that made her teeth itch and skin crawl. His insistent independence, the unwillingness to _tell _her when something was wrong, drove her mad. One could even say Mad.

And as the Doctor continued to lick the jam, Rose fitted all her malcontent into the Look, and stared at his finger.

Maybe she burned it. She hoped she did, because the Doctor retracted his finger as quickly as he had popped it in. "Right," he said. "Sorry." He had the sense to look ashamed.

The good thing about the Look is that it was silent, and the Doctor was a smart man. All of the things Rose would struggle to say verbally was translated properly into the Look, and the Doctor understood, or at least deduced, as much as Rose intended. As said in the beginning, this time it was a version of the third and fourth variation (Don't put yourself in stupid danger, and Don't stick that in your mouth),*** and it seemed that the Doctor had gotten it. Slowly, the Doctor extended his arms as a hesitant invitation. Rose, never one to refuse the offer of a hug, fitted herself into the Doctor's arms. They stayed there for some time, Rose listening to the Doctor's double heartbeat, and silently choked on the scent of burnt cherries.

When they parted, Rose rubbed irritably at her nose. "Just," she huffed. "_Tell_ me when you do stuff like that."

The Doctor frowned. "I did."

"No, you said 'blueberries.'"

The Doctor made a face that said that "blueberries" had sufficed as a proper explanation, and when Rose made a Face of her own (one terrible enough to earn its own capital F), he stepped back. They both heard a crunch.

"Aw," the Doctor whined, and looked forlornly at his feet. The remains of a small glass jar rattled against his sole, the red mush staining his converse. "That was lunch."

They settled for a small cafe at the edge of Bristol an hour later, and after a couple of glasses of wine, they completely forgot about the jam.****

* * *

* The market in question is called plainly the Fruit Market, located on William Street in Bristol, UK. It was a bit difficult to find a proper market that had inside cashiers in Bristol, especially when all you have is Google and absolutely no knowledge of the UK. (I might have just chosen a supplier and not a legitimate grocery store.) I embarrassingly discovered later that markets and grocery stores were not the same thing and almost changed the store. But then I got too attached to the idea of a rumbustious Doctor entering a homey fruit market, looking deranged with grease smeared all over his face, complaining over the fact that they didn't have blueberry jam, and doing a general job-well-done of disturbing the peace in this little market.

** Blueberry jam and apple jam have the highest level of pectin content, which is why the Doctor would have preferred either of them to use as a sort of glue for his capacitor and other broken things. If you couldn't tell already, I am making up 90% of this, but within reason. I did a bit of research about the chemical bonds and makeup of jams, and how pectin are sugar-based bonds that hold the molecules together and make a jam harder or softer. If you're actually a biologist, please don't ruin this for me; I have a vague sense of knowing this would never work, but I'm proud of my bullshitting nonetheless.

*** After this incident, the fourth version of the Look (Don't put that in your mouth) moved up the hierarchy to become the third version, because she had to repeat it several times afterwards. The TARDIS smelled like cherries for weeks.

**** Not _because _of the wine, but because another spaceship had crash landed three kilometers away from their cafe (remember what the Doctor had said about invasions happening near his vicinity? Must be another force of nature, like gravity.), and later in the day they discovered that the alcohol content was a good form of camouflage, and they had to douse themselves in several extra glasses. It was a poor day for both of their wardrobes. It was also a blessing nothing flammable was on board.


End file.
